The present invention addresses specific issues that arise in the design, implementation, operation and upgrading of data center environments. Data centers have a specific set of issues that they must face in relation to power supply and management, and the traditional methods in this area were developed from prior industrial electrical practice in a time when a typical data center held very small numbers of mainframe computers and the change rate was low. Now, data centers often contain tens of thousands of electronic data processing (EDP) devices with high rates of change and growth. Data centers are also experiencing rapidly growing power capacity demands driven by CPU power consumption that is currently increasing at a rate of approximately 1.2 annually. The methods developed in the past were not adopted to cope with these change rates, and data centers are therefore having great difficulty in scaling to meet those needs.